Boost the Conversion Rate of Your Event Landing Page

We all know that for an event to be successful, you need attendees, and while it is easy to set up a Facebook event and invite everyone you know, having your guests click ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ isn’t going to translate into actual attendance.

If you are searching up on “how to improve conversion rates on websites”, chances are that you are aware of how important a landing page is to your event, above social media marketing and EDMs.

Done well, an event landing page can be responsible for the bulk of your attendees—which is why it isn’t as simple as creating a web page and plonking in information.

Unfortunately, the exact way to make a highly successful landing page can be rather elusive; it all boils down to what your target audience like to see. However, with some research and experimentation, you can be well on your way to designing the golden combination. Check out these tips to improve conversion rates below!

Define the main goals of your landing page

Designing a landing page without any idea what you want is like entering a lottery. You take a wild guess on a number, and chances of winning are incredibly slim. Which is why you need a game plan, and that starts with defining what you want your landing page to achieve.

What do you want your target audience to do upon navigating to your event page—to sign-up immediately for the event, subscribe for more updates, or perhaps to find out more about your company and sponsors? What are the numbers you are expecting for each goal?

Of course, your primary objective is to improve conversion rates for the event, but defining these goals will help you create a concise call-to-action, supported by the design and copy of your landing page. It will also offer a key performance indicator to measure the success of your page.

Once you have your objectives, track these goals in Google Analytics, which will be an effective tool in your process of designing for an increased event page conversion rate. You will need to sign up for an Analytics account, which will provide you a tracking code to monitor your conversions.

Monitor your conversion rates via conversion tracking

Now that you have activated Google Analytics on your website, track your event page conversion rate through the actions of your audience. These include a destination page, duration of time spent on the page, the number of pages your users navigate to through the website, or events such as playing a video.

In the case of tracking event sign-ups and the likes, you can set up your destination page as the last page in the final step of signing up. Upon finalizing your goal, Google Analytics will begin tracking activity on your website and visualize these observations via graphs and data.

However, if you prefer a more in-depth and accurate conversion tracking, integrating AdWords will give you a better result. This is because Google Analytics tracks conversion via the time of action, while AdWords dates it back to the first time your user has accessed your landing page.

To put it in other words, if an attendee clicks into your event page and takes a couple of days to think over the offer before accessing the site again to sign up, AdWords is able to track the attendee’s behavior back to his or her first click, whereas Google Analytics records it as a fresh entry, on the day where the user signs up.

Integrating Google Analytics goals with AdWords conversion tracking is as easy as setting up an AdWords account and linking it up in Google Analytics. Once the platforms are synced, you can simply import Goals into AdWords for conversion tracking. For more effortless tracking however, check out Universal Analytics for GEVME users, which offers improved data processing and analysis.

Use usability testing in order to find out underlying issues in your design

As we mentioned earlier, the trick to improve conversion rates for your website lies in the hands of your target audience. Which is why usability testing is an important part of the design process.

In essence, usability testing puts your event landing page under the scrutiny of your target audience, allowing them to test the functions and user experience of your website. This will help you work out any kinks or distractions on the page that stands in the way of your goals, like a button that doesn’t work, or a complicated layout that distracts them from your call-to-action.

Once you have your prototype ready, send it over to selected members of your target users and have them review the user experience. You can choose from different types of usability testing—comparative; where your website is compared with your competitors’, or explorative testing; where users explore your landing page intuitively and you record their behaviors as well as detect any usability issues in your design.

Any part of the experience, including how long it takes for your user to navigate through the landing page and pick up the information can be vital feedback for improvements in your development process.

Experiment with different designs of your landing page

Having tackled the fundamental issues with your prototype and analyzed user preferences, you can now venture into creating variations of your event website. Experiment with layouts, colors, fonts, graphics and images that you think works best for your users and effectively leads them through the signup process.

Remember to keep it simple. Less is more when it comes to an event landing page. When a potential attendee accesses your website, chances are they are not going to take the time to read every word. To optimize the experience for them, have clear and concise headlines and subheads, and keep your copy short and sweet.

Users should be able to quickly find out what the event is about; the date, time and venue of your event; who to contact for enquiries; and most importantly, where and how to sign up.

This is the case for your registration forms as well. Short forms boost conversion rates as compared to longer forms, which puts users off due to the time and hassle involved. Only ask for essential information that you need, and make the payment a breeze by allowing attendees to pay online. Check out these 7 Best Practices for Event Landing Pages for more tips.

Evaluate your designs using A/B testing in Google Analytics

When you are done with your variants, it is survival of the fittest between your designs. Find out which design resonates best with your audience and boosts conversion rates by setting up split A/B testing in Google Analytics, otherwise called Content Experiments.

To keep the results straightforward and easy to analyze, try to focus on one element in each experimentation. If each of your test pages are drastically different (i.e layout, headlines, colors and visuals) it can be hard to figure out what exactly triggered the differences in conversion.

Content Experiments in Google Analytics allows you to compare and test the variations of your landing page by dividing your web traffic to each of your test pages. By setting the desired outcome, which in your case, is to improve website conversion rate, Content Experiments records user behaviors on each experiment and compares the results generated by every variant to define the winning design.

A/B testing can be as short or as lengthy as you want it to be. Content Experiments allows you to configure the amount of web traffic you want to involves, as well as the goal metrics to define when the experiment ends.

Choose the best variant of your landing page… and don’t stick to it

Once you have your winning design from Content Experiments, the process is pretty straightforward. Choose the best variant of your landing page that generates the most conversions, or what we call your golden combination, at the moment at least. The industry and consumer habits are always changing, so careful attention should be paid to your goals and conversion tracking, as you have set up in Google Analytics.

If conversion rates take a dip after the initial launch of your landing page, consider going back to the drawing board and making tweaks to your design.After all, research and experimentation should never end and going through these steps again may yield a vast improvement in your results.

A great landing page is not just a place to drive marketing efforts to. It provides your potential attendees information that they need, encourages them to sign up, and seamlessly guides them through the process. By designing the best landing page for your audience, you are likely to be expecting a successful turnout at your event. So why wait? Create event landing pages that get you registrations now.